Sino-US cooperation for creative ideas on campus lifestyle: How we deal with cafeteria sustainability?

When walking around the campus, one can often see students interviewing our peers, faculty members, or campus staff workers. You may wonder what they are doing and why they are doing this. Are these students journalists for the campus newspaper or are they taking part in some campus-wide activities? Actually, they are our freshmen students from ZJUI who are preparing for their Engineering Orientation course project themed on “Human-centered Engineering and Global Collaboration”.

Kick off an international cooperative project

This project, unlike any other usual homework assigned to us, is a Sino-US collaborative project. There are four topics to choose from: online communication, learning management systems, transportation and cafeteria sustainability. My group decided to choose the fourth topic.

Settle on the interviewees and questions

At the first meeting everyone in this new group was a bit shy of course. We briefly introduced ourselves to each other. It was a pity that not every team member arrived for it could have been a very good chance for us to learn more about each other. After that, we talked about who we could interview to get the information we want. After the first meet-up we started interviewing people to gather information about the current status of sustainability in our cafeterias. My ZJUI teammate and I interviewed a freshmen student and a worker at the campus drop-off site, while our American teammates interviewed a residential assistant (RA). It turns out that there are several patterns in our results. First, all our interviewees emphasized the seriousness of food waste and agreed that a lot of food is wasted every day in our cafeterias; all our interviewees believed that bad food quality and unawareness of food waste are some of the major reasons why a lot of food gets thrown away.

Brainstorm for possible solutions

Then we brainstormed upon these understandings to find some possible solutions to improve sustainability and shared them on our second online meeting. Some of our proposals include improving food quality, having the incoming freshmen complete an exam on food waste and putting up posters. We brought these solutions to a second round of interviews.

We still interviewed a freshman, an RA, but change the third target from a worker at drop-off site to a worker at the cafeteria, to understand the ideas of an insider. We finally agreed on the last one because we acknowledged that one to be the most feasible one. To serve thousands of people, it could be very hard to prepare the food very carefully and make them delicate according to a cook at ZJUI cafeteria.

How to stretch the influence?

Putting up poster is very practical to get attention, since it’s very easy and cheap to make posters and they can be put everywhere in the campus. However, many people may just ignore them, only those who were already taking actions in saving up food or had the wish to do so would have the patience or interest to look at them. Or people may just forget the information and tips on the poster very easily.

So first, attractive enough. There should be some lovely illustrations on our poster to make it more appealing and some useful tips to make it more educational. But that’s only the first step.

Our American teammates then came up with another brilliant idea. We would not only make “put-on-the-wall” posters, but also print our posters on napkins and paper tray mats provided by the cafeteria, like what they are doing in KFCs or other fast-food chain stores. In this way, cafeteria users are forced to have more “eye contacts” with our posters.

This method could also have a warning effect. When cafeteria users are looking at both their plates with quite some left-over food and a poster that teaches them to save up food, they may feel guilty and continue finishing their food or remember to order less the next time they use the cafeteria. To make it even more eco-friendly, since some of our interviewee also told us that the use of plastic tableware is a sabotaging the sustainability of our cafeterias, we can even use recycled material to make our posters, napkins, and mats.

Clock hit nine

Clock hit nine and our presentation should begin. We were the fourth group to present and I was the first to speak. Paz and I were still communicating through email about the order of appearance and some details before we actually began. The presentation was very quick and eventually, everything went well. Judging from the facial expression of our facilitator, we did a quite excellent job. Below is our first draft poster:

“How to Handle Food Waste” by my teammate Samantha Linares

What I’ve learned?

I would like to share some of my thoughts and reflections during the project in this section. During the time I spent working on this project, I learned a lot about both the ZJUI and UIUC students community, the food service community, and the engineers community. In terms of students community, I realized that there are a lot of students who consider the food served in the cafeterias bad just like me; I learned about what RAs on UIUC campus are and what they do every day.

Moreover, I was also impressed by my American teammates’ efficient working ability and hard-working attitude, just look at Paz and Paige who worked until late night and Samantha who made a beautiful poster in such a short time. In terms of the food service community, I realize that the food waste problem is far more serious than what I think it is.

In terms of engineering community, I learned a common way of working for engineers. Engineers are like the backbones of the society, they make people’s lives easier and more comfortable by improving, inventing, and innovating, so engineers must do field research to find the actual needs of the people they’re designing for to build something that is beneficial instead of invalid designs. And this is where I believe I’m going to in the future: finding the needs, learning about the needs, and meeting the needs.